B/4 and Ever After
B/4
Getting certified had become my new habit in mid-life. This wasn’t the worst addiction out there in 1019. There I was, I was an aspiring filmmaker, caught in a bi-costal live-work situation, between Brooklyn and The Bay Area, while getting certified in my new expensive hobby, aerial yoga. This habit of earning certifications came with a certain hope to turn my expensive hobbies into income streams. You also get a laminated diploma, or a wallet-sized card you can show off to people. By then, my midlife map looked like a zig zag, from PADI Deep diver, to Thai Yoga Massage Practitioner, to Aerial Yoga Instructor—with no pay-off in sight. But hey, I was learning that a person can learn and study, and learn more and study more for a lifetime—as long as that person has a paying job and safe place called home, one that can’t be taken away from them.
Enter the plot twist. Part of this story was told recently at the NYS Loft Board public hearing in a downtown Manhattan courthouse. I’ve waited to disclose the details, until I had a less-sad ending. I’ll keep it brief for the shorter attention spans of our modern culture. Here’s what went down: My landlord tried to illegally evict me from the artists loft where I’d been a responsible, rent-paying tenant for nearly twenty years.
New York Landlords are a special breed of greedy, with well-known tactics to boot decent tenants out of leases, in order to raise the rent. I knew this much, but I did not know my landlord was actually Putin. Or that in a matter of days his request to “make a few improvments” to my unit, would turn every corner of my home to rubble, where dust, floods, theft and other forms of hell ensued, just as the world shut down for the pandemic. Sadly, my list of hobby-certifications did not prepare me for the ugly legal battle, or my unending stretch of unemployment, or a world shutdown. Day by day I lived in gratitude for my shelter with supportive friends who let me live in their basement Airbnb for a San Francisco song. It wasn’t the worst place to ride out the pandemic; it just wasn’t my place, or my city, or my community. That list becomes very important during, let’s-face-it—war times. Living like a refugee, I waited for the moment I could return to NY and sleep in my own bed, and resume a life I’d spent years in the making. But in my periphery, all I could see were the walls of my sustenance coming apart brick by brick, my fear primal, disturbing on a cellular level. My body went into a fixed state of fight or flight and then crashed with a health scare I won’t get into due to shorter attention spans of this modern era. The fallout impacted every decision I made thereafter. It’s no surprise my next move was an online certification program in movement for trauma and recovery with the mind-body wizard, Tara Stiles.
From there I understood how to calm my nerves, which were under the constant threat of more fight and flight. I learned how panic changes our neurology and keeps you locked in that elevated state of emergency, deep in the animal brain. My animal brain remained stuck on a loop of anxious questions: Even if I won the battle with Putin, how would I pay legal bills? Or my rent? Would my insurance cover brain surgery? After “the improvements”, my loft would go from a two bedroom to a single bedroom. As the sole lease-holding tenant, I was now unable to divide the rent with a flatmate by law. Gone too were other guarantees for my livelihood. I’d be entering a competitive job market that didn’t care about my extensive resume in the fashion industry, and remained ever more brutal to women over 50—who may hold a degree from and Ivy League, but only go on to earn too many certifications. Yikes! I’d reached a new low of rock bottom. This was next level, sub-basement.
I remember my breakdown, slouching over a pile of broken records and boxes of molded photos in my destroyed living room—crying. How did my card-carrying-cool zig-zag path end with this? As an artist, a band leader, a storyteller and a B-sider—this shitty pile covered in toxic dust was now my life to clean up. I blinked and looked up at the ceiling through my tears. Ten feet above me, the pipes dripped a brownish yuck that fell to the floor and splattered by my feet. I stared up again, squinting as I calculated the distance of the next drop about to fall. I could have been fixated on this new leak, but instead I blinked hard and my brain jumped to a new thought, “Look how high that pipe is!” and I smiled wide “ Wait!” I said to the silence, “I have high ceilings!”
I felt instantly giddy as my revelation bubbled to the surface, “I can turn all of this… into an aerial yoga studio!” I sat up straight, feeling slightly fierce again, my eyes fixed on those ten foot ceilings and how I could fill my old living room with joy and soothing aerial silks.
Next, I fought my Putin-esque Landlord…and I won. Two years later, I’ve opened Aerapy Method, the first holistic aerial movement salon of its kind in Dumbo Brooklyn. With lo fi chill tunes by Air, Mazzy Star and Zero 7, I always set the mood to what I believe the world needs now: 100% radical calm & resilience.
The Ever After
This is my substitute for what once looked like a very sad ending. This my very fulfilling life. Designing rad set lists for my aerial classes is now my job. Getting certified in new aerial techniques in Costa Rica is also my job, as is helping stressed out urbanites heal and connect with their bodies—this is my dream. I didn’t have a 5 year plan or career strategy and I didn’t get here with a straight line; I got here from a real crisis, a bumpy zig and a rocky zag. I got here because I got certified in everything.
In precisely 2 years.
